Twenty years after NASA’s iconic 'Pillars of Creation' image captured a series of gaseous columns stretching an astonishing five light years high, the space agency has recaptured the same scene and rendered it in high-definition.

Originally taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, the
Pillars of Creation image depicts the massive gas clouds
spreading across a small region of the Eagle Nebula, also known
as M16, located about 6,500 light years away from Earth. The
clouds are impressive on their own, but what makes the image even
more unique is that the pillars are bathed in ultraviolet light
coming from a cluster of massive stars.

NASA decided to remake the image as part of the 25th anniversary
celebration of the Hubble’s launch, which comes around this
April.

The agency recaptured the scene in both visible and infrared
light, creating an image far more detailed than the previous one.
As noted by NASA, new stars can now be seen being born inside the
pillars.

Additionally, new details from the image indicate that, in
addition to showcasing a region giving birth to new stars, the
pillars are also being destroyed by the very star light they are
bathed in.

“The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the
pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into
space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and
short-lived moment in their evolution,” said Paul Scowen of
Arizona State University in Tempe on NASA’s website.

The top edges of the pillars, particularly the pillar on the
left, reveal space matter that is currently being blasted away by
radiation from the nearby star cluster.

“These pillars represent a very dynamic, active
process,” Scowen added. “The gas is not being passively
heated up and gently wafting away into space. The gaseous pillars
are actually getting ionized, a process by which electrons are
stripped off of atoms, and heated up by radiation from the
massive stars. And then they are being eroded by the stars’
strong winds and barrage of charged particles, which are
literally sandblasting away the tops of these pillars.”

As amazing as the new image looks, perhaps just as interesting is
the fact that what people are looking at now, in high-definition,
may not actually exist anymore. According to data from NASA’s Spitzer Space
Telescope, the pillars may have actually collapsed some 6,000
years ago after a star exploded. The only reason we are able to
see the pillars at all is because of how far away they are from
Earth.

“Because light from this region takes 7,000 years to reach
Earth, we won't be able to capture photos of the destruction for
another 1,000 years or so,” wrote Whitney Clavin of NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Notably, NASA also said that our sun probably formed in a
star-forming region very similar to the one captured in the
Pillars of Creation image, since it would have needed the kind of
strong radiation that blasted the pillars away to be born.

“That’s the only way the nebula from which the sun was born
could have been exposed to a supernova that quickly, in the short
period of time that represents, because supernovae only come from
massive stars, and those stars only live a few tens of millions
of years,” said Scowen. “What that means is when you
look at the environment of the Eagle Nebula or other star-forming
regions, you’re looking at exactly the kind of nascent
environment that our sun formed in.”